Talking to Yourself

One of the many things I like about learning a new language is the unexpected social and cultural insights. Japanese for example has different levels of politeness: verbs and even nouns change their form depending on whether you're speaking to, say, your friend, a stranger or your boss.

A conversation from my intermediate Japanese class:

Japanese teacher:	If you're talking to yourself, it's better to use the polite form.
Fellow student:	What! Why??
Japanese teacher:	Because a senior person may overhear.

D7 Bus Stops

The names of bus stops on the D7 route in London are straight out of an Enid Blyton book.

Slightly-Larger-than-Average Moon

The term 'supermoon' may be mostly hype, but it's as good an excuse as any to go out and look up.

Of late my posting has been even more irregular than usual. I have however been writing about bees on the LSE Bees blog, and book reviews for the LSE Review of Books. On the off chance that either of those interest you, go take a look!

Law and Morality

I was in Lyon last weekend, and wandering around the Croix-Rousse district, we noticed this piece of graffiti:

Anasua:	I think they mean "what".
Me:	Ah. "Was" must be a misprint.
Philipp:	...because they don't know what is right.

Me Time

Like most UK universities, LSE has a system of 'office hours' – weekly slots when students can book one-to-one meetings with academics. This term I'm teaching undergraduate classes, but I'm also a PhD student. This puts me in the interesting position of being able to book an appointment with myself.

Tomatoes

Happy equinox, everyone! Here are some tomatoes from our balcony garden.

Patterns in Coffee

What do you think this is?

Unless you scrutinised the photo very carefully, you probably answered "Cream". But despite the "Double" in large type and the strawberry graphic, there is tiny type at the bottom which says "alternative to cream". In fact, Elmlea is a "blend of buttermilk and vegetable oils" whose only advantage, as far as I can see, is that it "keeps up to 5 days opened in the fridge, compared to 3 days for double cream."

I've never knowingly bought Elmlea – my dislike for dairy substitutes is well-documented – but this week I thought I'd try it out because the shop didn't have real cream. As an experiment I put some into my morning coffee. The coffee was inedible (I discovered that Elmlea, unlike cream, does not mix with coffee), but at least it made a cool pattern.

London vs Cambridgeshire

This week the Widescreen Centre, the last surviving telescope shop in Central London, announced that they are relocating to Cambridgeshire. The reasons they cited for the move are "[t]he current economic climate, changing retail patterns, and critically a major rent review due imminently".

I only visited their shop once, to buy a solar filter to observe the transit of Mercury. The Widescreen Centre folk graciously answered some questions I had about telescopes, although I'd made it clear that I wasn't looking to buy one. They are also among the core members of my astronomy club (their announcement says they will continue to come for our monthly meets in London).

Rent is not the only thing that makes Cambridgeshire more conducive to astronomy than London. I took this photo last month when my friend Rohini and I went stargazing in Hampstead Heath in London. If you hover over the image, you can see the names of major constellations as well as two Messier objects: the Pleiades Star Cluster and the Andromeda Galaxy.

Try as we might, we could not see the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye (the photo above was a 15-second exposure, so the camera captured about twice as many stars as our eyes could see).

For me, the most striking thing about the photo is the light pollution. Long after sunset on a clear night, the light from thousands of buildings and streetlamps gives the London sky an unsightly orange cast. Compare this with a photo I posted earlier this year of the International Space Station over Cambridgeshire (hover to see constellation labels):

Relatedly, the photographer Nicholas Buer has a wonderful video simulation of what London would look like if there were no light pollution.